The Heavenly Host

When she was done, they would all have fresh, youthful complexions, perfect health, no deformities and no disease. Now it would be too cruel to do the Geis of manual labor, but she was not above a Geis of not allowing themselves to be willingly harmed. She had done no such thing to Rathbart, but he had not tried to harm her. These thugs needed more punishment. Thus, she would Geis them to stay clean and well-presented and to avoid allowing themselves to be willingly maimed or hurt. They would still be able to get hurt defending themselves or someone else; they just wouldn’t be able to sit still and allow themselves or someone else to wound or maim them for the sake of employment as a beggar.

It would be exhausting — she would really need that bubble bath at home, and then maybe even a short nap before her planned morning rooftop adventure — but it was fun. It was a great opportunity to do Tiernon’s work and unofficially take a bit of revenge on those who had sought to harm her. She felt she was allowed some small sin of satisfaction in this. She grinned and got down to the work at hand.

∼

^{DOF +4/DOF +5}

^{Late Period 6/Early Period 1 16-02-440}

Tom closed the giant double doors behind them and waited to hear the two D’Orcs who had escorted them to the Master’s Suite, as they had called it, leave. Unfortunately, from the sound of their giant axes thumping to the right and left of the door, he assumed they had taken up guard.

He looked around the giant entryway to the suite. It was huge and quite opulent, if a bit heavy on the gold and silver for his taste. He spotted the double doors leading to the bedroom and gestured everyone to follow him through. He then shut the door behind them.

The place was rather dusty. Zelda had apologized profusely, but they had not known he was coming. He had assured her it would be fine. He just needed somewhere to rest and contemplate, even as he was sure they did. That contemplate line did not seem to sit well with her though.

“Okay, how the hell did that just happen?” Tom asked raising his hands above his head as he paced nervously in the room. “This has got to be the most insane thing yet! I am in so far over my head!”

“Demon, your ruses are getting tiresome. Why do you insist on this charade? Clearly this was all part of your plan to regain your powers!” Talarius stated.

Tom spun and stared at the knight. “Are you serious? You have been with me this entire time, heard everything I have said, seen everything I have done, and participated in the process. You chose many of the passages we followed!”

“You are cunning, I give you that,” Talarius said.

“Seriously? Seriously! You think I got enslaved by Lenamare, trapped in Freehold and was then forced out only to have you shoot down Rupert and need to come rescue him and then end up battling you?” Tom waved his hand.

“Next, I would have had to know that you would cheat! You recall my shock at your methods? So I knew that the virtuous Knight Rampant of Tiernon would be outside the city ready to trap Rupert as bait for me, we would end up dueling and you would cheat to almost defeat me, and then I would have to pull a rabbit out of a hat! I had to do something no one even conceived of as possible — intercept a god’s mana stream and possess a bunch of priests — then defeat you and reverse the dagger and store up a ton of extra god mana for later use?”

Tom was pacing in circles around the knight, clearly frustrated. He tossed his mace on the very large bed and watched a cloud of dust rise up and then settle before resuming his pacing. “I then wait for you to rest up and get healed, and somehow get Boggy to take us all to a spa for massages and heated lava, as well as some lich-slaying on the side for some of us. Then I somehow get us to ALL agree to a long hike through the Abyss to the Crystal Caverns, without saying much of anything. I then convince you to stock up on gems and arrange it so we all start on an underground trip to get more gold.”

If Tom had hair, he would have been pulling it out. “I then manage to get us lost and have us all nearly eaten by hydra hounds as we randomly run around corridors. I knew that by random chance we would wander into a lair of D’Orcs who would think we were invaders and chase us along the passageway you chose that led to a dead end.”

Tom pointed a claw at the knight. “As I recall, it was you and your armor that allowed us to see the runes. Runes put there by Etonians. Runes that no demon should have been able to open. So I just reused some tricks I’d learned fighting you, along with mana I stole from your god, to activate the runes and open a magical doorway that let us escape.